walterjsd

Tell me if something like this is possible:

A guy robs a bank and uses his Acura (or any other car with a navigation system and On Star) as the getaway car. A few days later the police get a tip and investigate this man. He states he was nowhere near the crime scene and driving in another city at the time. They can't find any conclusive evidence, but find out he has a GPS system in his car. They search computer records from On Star and/or tracking (history) information within his GPS system and can determine that his car was in the vicinity of the bank at the time of the robbery. They use this evidence to arrest him.

Now forgetting the legalities, police process that I might have bypassed, or lack of other evidence, it is technically possible to track where a car was several days ago in this manor?

walterjsd

pianoman41

Not unless he used OnStar while he committed the robbery. The navigation system in the Acura (and most others) is passive, meaning it does not transmit anything so there's no way to get the GPS data out of the car. Now OnStar utilizes the GPS data and transmits it to OnStar via a cellular link, but ONLY when initiated by the customer (or the police after a bonifide request from a customer). If the OnStar in the Acura wasn't used during that time, there would be no record of the GPS data. Had the call been made AND the customer made a request that required the need of a GPS track, that info is logged by OnStar and could possibly be used in identifying where the vehicle was over the last three days.

So, if your concern was "Does OnStar track my every move?", the answer is no, it doesn't. Could OnStar locate the car on its own? Yes it could, but in your scenario above they would have no reason to do so prior to the police finding out about the bank robbery.